Curator Meriem Berrada and artist Prune Nourry on collective remembrance, sculptural presence, and the afterlives of absence at MACAAL.
4 April 2026
At MACAAL, ‘Statues Also Breathe’ unfolds as both monument and gesture, a collective act that resists disappearance through form. Bringing together 108 terracotta heads shaped through a collaborative process between Prune Nourry, artisans, and students, the exhibition draws on the visual language of Ife sculpture while confronting the ongoing absence of the Chibok girls. Curator Meriem Berrada and artist Prune Nourry speak about the ethics of representation, the politics of memory, and the ways in which sculpture can hold, and perhaps return, breath to those rendered invisible.
Installation view of CONVERGE in Seven Contours, One Collection at MACAAL © Ayoub El Bardii.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: ‘Statues Also Breathe’ transforms sculpture into a space of remembrance and witness. As a curator, how did you approach presenting a work that carries such profound emotional and political weight, particularly within MACAAL’s institutional context?
Meriem Berrada: Presenting ‘Statues Also Breathe’ at MACAAL required a careful balance between respect, reflection, and accessibility. From the very beginning, we wanted the installation to create the conditions for a genuine encounter, one where the emotional and political weight of the work could be fully felt without becoming overwhelming. Many things drew me to this project with conviction: the urgency of the subject itself, the need to keep the story of the Chibok girls visible, and the extraordinary opportunity the work offers to bring the Yoruba sculptural tradition of Ile-Ife, one of the great artistic legacies of the continent, to the foreground. And the way Prune Nourry approaches her projects with a rare combination of precision and tenderness, where the people and histories she works with are never reduced to a cause. That quality of attention is what makes this project so compelling, and it is what made me want to bring it to MACAAL. The museum context allows us to hold all of these dimensions together: situating the project within a broader dialogue about memory, resilience, and collective responsibility, while also affirming the depth and vitality of a living artistic heritage. We focused on creating an environment where visitors can connect with each sculpture individually – standing with them, not simply reading about them – while feeling the full power of the 108 heads as a collective, an indivisible presence that speaks to both loss and solidarity.
Installation view at MACAAL. Installation in situ, 108 sculpted heads in clay on metal tripods. Courtesy of Catharsis Arts Foundation. © James Stapleton.
The installation brings together 108 terracotta heads created by students and artisans, inspired by portraits of the still-missing Chibok girls and by the aesthetics of historic Ife sculpture. How does this dialogue between ancestral forms and contemporary trauma shape how audiences read the work today?
Meriem Berrada: The dialogue between the Ife sculptural tradition and contemporary events is central to the work’s resonance today. But what strikes me most is what this project refuses: the idea that ancestral forms belong only to the past, that they should be preserved behind glass, admired as heritage rather than inhabited as a living language. ‘Statues Also Breathe’ demonstrates something else entirely, that when these forms are reactivated in the present, they offer something no contemporary vocabulary alone could produce. They carry time within them. They speak of continuity, of a humanity that persists across rupture. By grounding the project in the Ife tradition, the installation allows audiences to see the Chibok girls’ story not as an isolated tragedy, but as part of a continuum that connects cultural identity, resilience, and shared humanity – one where the past does not simply illuminate the present, but answers it.
Installation view of TRANSCRIBE in Seven Contours, One Collection at MACAAL © Ayoub El Bardii.
Collaboration sits at the heart of this project, involving artists, students, potters, families, and survivors. From a curatorial standpoint, how do you translate such a collective process into an exhibition format without reducing the multiplicity of voices involved?
Prune Nourry: ‘Statues Also Breathe’ is really a work of collective authorship. The process brought together the families of the Chibok abductees, their sisters who escaped captivity, arts students, faculty, researchers, and local potters and artisans.
This diversity is reflected by the army itself. Each head is visibly signed by its author on the back. Each work, though unified by its intent and Yoruba aesthetic, is different, and that difference forms a unified ensemble. No two heads are the same, and that difference is the point.
The documentary shown alongside the installation is also essential to this translation. It serves as an archive of the process and a space where the polyphony of voices can be heard on their own terms. It resists the tendency of exhibition formats to flatten complex, lived processes into a single, legible narrative.
Curatorially speaking, there are also certain tools used to express that: all participating students and collaborators are named in the wall text, not as a footnote but as a visible part of the presentation. Alongside this is an updated list of the Chibok girls, maintained by Mr Nkeki, director of the Chibok Parents Association, a document that anchors the work to the ongoing reality it responds to.
Perhaps most importantly, the collaborators were just credited but were also present. At the 1-54 panel, during the press tour, and at the opening. We were able to bring a participating student, the head of the Arts Department at the university, Mr Nkeki, representing the families, and two survivors, Rahab and Margaret, who spent years in Boko Haram captivity and now study at the American University of Yola, and they also work with Catharsis Arts Foundation on the ground. Through their presence, the exhibition became a continuation of the collective process.
Installation view of CONVERGE in Seven Contours, One Collection at MACAAL © Ayoub El Bardii.
The work speaks to absence, yet the sculptural “army” also insists on presence. How does the exhibition negotiate the tension between memorialisation and the risk of aestheticising a still-unresolved tragedy?
Prune Nourry: Newspapers can report in a way that feels immediate and shocking, and yet the news cycle moves on, and what felt urgent is replaced by the next headline. Sculpture works differently. It is slower; it requires presence. With ‘Statues Also Breathe’, we created a platform for remembrance. You are not reading about the missing abductees from Chibok; you are standing with them. It is an embodied encounter that creates empathy and emotion with a longer-lasting impact. Sculpture embodies absence here, paradoxically. The heads are both portrait and memorial, and they insist on what isn’t abstract.
As for the risk of aestheticisation: grounding the works in traditional Yoruba sculpting, in a collaborative process, posting the living list of names maintained by the Chibok Parents Association… these are ways to ensure the work remains anchored in storytelling, truth and community, rather than aestheticising. The beauty of the work is not ornamental. It is what makes people stay and feel that this is not a distant story but one that belongs to all of us.
Installation view of WEAVE in Seven Contours, One Collection at MACAAL © Ayoub El Bardii.
At MACAAL, Statues Also Breathe engages with a broader institutional narrative on memory, identity, and contemporary African artistic practices. What conversations does the installation open with the museum’s collection and its wider curatorial programme?
Meriem Berrada: Within MACAAL, the installation’s placement is itself a curatorial statement. Situated in the atrium, ‘Statues Also Breathe’ occupies a threshold position (literally and conceptually) between two axes that structure our permanent collection. The first engages with questions of decolonisation, understood here not only through subject matter but through form and material: what does it mean to think with clay, with ancestral sculptural languages, rather than simply about them? The second axis turns toward cohabitation: questions of living together, of shared space, of resistance to obscurantism in all its forms. The installation speaks to both. It arrives with a tradition that refuses to be relegated to the past, and with a story that reminds us that the struggle against fanaticism and the erasure of women is not distant – it is ongoing and concerns us all. In that sense, ‘Statues Also Breathe’ does not illustrate our programme. It crystallises it.
Installation view of COHABIT in Seven Contours, One Collection at MACAAL © Ayoub El Bardii.
The exhibition includes a documentary that foregrounds the voices of teachers, students, and families involved in the project. How important was it for you to expand the exhibition beyond the sculptural installation and create space for these narratives within the museum?
Meriem Berrada: The film does something the objects cannot do on their own: it incarnates the human reality behind the work. It lets you hear the teachers, the students, and the mothers. It makes the process of making and of collective healing visible and tangible.
What this project demonstrates, and what the documentary makes undeniable, is that ‘Statues Also Breathe’ is not a sculpture project. It is a collective experience that listens carefully and rigorously to every person involved, and holds those voices in relation to one another with great precision.
This is also why we deliberately decided how and where to show the film. Rather than placing it within the exhibition space itself, we chose to present it alongside the original moulds used to create the heads in our mediation space. That choice was intentional: we wanted to bring these elements closer to the public, in a space of exchange rather than contemplation, where the process behind the work could be encountered directly, without the distance that an exhibition format can sometimes impose. The moulds, in particular, carry something the finished sculptures do not: the trace of hands and the intimacy of making.
Installation view of CONVERGE in Seven Contours, One Collection at MACAAL © Ayoub El Bardii.
In an era when institutions across the continent are rethinking the role of museums, what does it mean for MACAAL to host a project that functions not only as an artwork, but also as a collective act of remembrance and advocacy?
Meriem Berrada: MACAAL has always understood its role as something more than the preservation and display of objects. We exist in a city, in a continent, in a present tense.
Hosting ‘Statues Also Breathe’ is an extension of that commitment. But I would go further: a project like this one reminds us that advocacy and artistic rigour are not in tension. The work is formally ambitious, historically grounded, and politically urgent, all at once. It does not choose between beauty and necessity. And that, to me, is precisely what the most important art does.
There is also something specific to this moment on the continent. We are witnessing a remarkable generation of African institutions, curators, and artists refusing the frameworks that have historically marginalised African artistic practices – refusing the idea that African art is either an ethnographic object or an exotic supplement to a Western canon. ‘Statues Also Breathe’, with its roots in the Ife tradition and its eyes wide open to the present, is part of that refusal.
This exhibition was on view at MACAAL, Marrakech, until 8 January 2027.
